This week’s favourite thing will take a little longer than five minutes, but it’s so worth it!

I had the very great privilege of being in the Brisbane Baroque Festival audience when Emily Cox’s Canticum Chamber Choir performed Vivaldi’s Women of the Pieta suite, which Vivaldi wrote for the Ospedale of the Pieta, a home for the care of illegitimate daughters of Venetian noblemen in Venice. These received a thorough education and superb musical training – usually funded by their (mostly anonymous) fathers – and their performances were famed throughout Europe and beyond.

It turns out Vivaldi wrote a lot of music just for these young girls, and accomplished conductor Emily Cox made sure we understood why, artfully leading her choir and orchestra of women into producing some of the finest choral music I’ve ever heard. It was breathtaking in its beauty, soaring and sweeping and perfectly set in Brisbane’s Gothic Revival Anglican Cathedral.

Sadly, this week’s performance in Brisbane wasn’t recorded – or not yet that I’ve discovered – so here instead is a recording made for the BBC some years ago. Should you have the opportunity to hear this wonderful piece live, don’t miss it!